After a weekend filled with great auroral activity in Northern Canada and Scandinavia thanks to a strong gust of solar wind coming off the Sun January 19th, the Earth is about to get hit again – by the biggest blast of solar radiation in 7 years. Talk about a one-two punch on the cosmic scale!

Late last night…a giant, long lasting, solar flare erupted off the face of the Sun, sending a giant Coronal Mass Ejection – cloud of plasma and charged particles – squarely towards the Earth. Detected by NASA’s sun-monitoring satellites SOHO and STEREO, the solar blast was determined to be an M9 on the Richter scale of solar flares – just shy of an X- class flare which is ranked as the most powerful. Space weather forecasters at NOAA – who keep watch for any hazardous, incoming solar storms – are expecting the brunt of the CME to slam into Earth’s magnetic field Jan.24 around 9 am EST (2 pm UT) +/- 7 hours…

Already the front of the storm is now being felt as space radiation (energized protons) speeds by Earth, states the Spaceweather.com website. The high influx of charged particles hitting the magnetic field poses a hazard to everything from GPS signals, polar radio communications, power grids and circuit boards on orbiting satellites.

What does this mean for chances of seeing Northern Lights? If the geomagnetic storm becomes moderate to strong then auroras may creep down to southern latitudes like Texas and Georgia – but that’s pretty rare. Exactly how intense and widespread the sky show will be depends on how our planet’s magnetic field is oriented at the time when the storm arrives.

You don’t even need it to be a DSLR – just a decent camera that can handle a 20 second exposure. My “big” camera has a wireless remote that will let me open and then close the shutter for any time period I feel like counting off.

But, I don’t expect to see any aurora at this latitude. Yes – I will go outside and look, though.